An Illustration Of Loneliness (Sleepless In Spartax)
by LegendaryStarCat
Summary: Songfic inspired by Courtney Barnett's An Illustration Of Loneliness (Sleepless In New York). It gets lonely when you're a thousand parsecs away from the one you love. Peter Quill/Kitty Pryde


Kitty lay on her side, staring into the middle distance, eyes blurring at the backdrop of the grey wall, the hull of the Guardian's ship.

According to the clock by her bunk, it was four where they were. Wherever they were. Gamora had sent her to her room (practically sent her to her room, as if she were Kitty's mother or something) around midnight. Kitty had been laying awake for four hours now.

She had started on her back, staring at the worn grey ceiling, the metal shiny and dinged. It was Peter's old room, and the remanence of him was apparent; the were posters hanging on the walls (an older Dazzler one, from her tour in the early 90s-Kitty had kept that one, as it reminded her of when she first went to the Academy-and a newer Lila Cheney one that Kitty had carefully rolled up and tucked away), a picture of her (which she didn't know how he got), a creased spot on the door where Peter had probably kicked his jet boots into it...

Kitty turned to her side when the ceiling began to blur into too much nothingness. The wall she faced was blank, save for a network of cracks carved into it from time and damage. She slowly counted the cracks in her head. Forwards, then backwards. Then in every other language she knew; Japanese, Russian, Ord, French...

She thought of a book Franklin Richards had once read to her, on the astral plane, when her body was stuck being untouchable. Franklin was the only one who could talk to her, and at five years old, he maybe didn't have much to say to her. So he started reading oddity books to her, flipping around to parts he thought were interesting. She appreciated just the fact that he was company.

The book was about palmistry. The topic had always fascinated Kitty, although, even in a world of mutants and masterminds, she still found the thought of palm reading a bit laughable. But when life seemed so unstable, maybe it was nice to have some idea of what's in store for you.

Her eyes came to focus on the cracks, and she pretended that the flat of the wall was the skin of her palms, and each etched metal crinkle was representative of what was going on.

She lost a breath.

Her love-line seemed intertwined with death.

She thought of Peter.

.

Peter lay awake at three. Spartax sucked without Kitty. All the politics and rules and laws were boring without his crew of miscreants. Of course, they almost always inevitably broke the laws and rules and decorum. Maybe that's why they were so much fun?

He lay, his back flat on the too-soft-without-Kitty mattress and stared up at the ceiling. It was a kind of off-white, maybe a cream? It wasn't pristine, like the rest of the palace; there was a small oily patch floating above his head. Was it his fault? Had he spray some fuel or WD40 above his head?

He didn't think so (but you never know). Maybe it was from the kitchen, which he thought might possible be above him (odd placement). The kitchen, or really, the dining area was an oddity itself.

Everything looked too modern there, yet too old fashioned and almost scary. "Art-deco, necromantic chic" is how Kitty once described it. All the dinner plates, she called "kitsch," and he had to say she was right: they were covered in the Spartaxian versions of Irish Wolf Hounds, foxes, and some kind of weird baguettes tied around the necks of the dogs.

His stomach rumbled and he frowned. He was hungry.

And he was thinking of Kitty, too.

.

Kitty wondered what Peter was doing right now. Was he listening to music? That was a pretty safe bet.

She rolled over on her other side and looked out the thick windows next to her bed, looked into the darkness of space. Could they see the same moons from their bedrooms? That seemed a lot less likely.

.

Peter fiddled with his phone, too distracted to really watch the movie he had begun to play on it. (Kitty was out of service.) He had a smoothie he had scrounged from the kitchen in his hand. It was cold and wetted his skin and he thought, 'hey, maybe I'll go for a swim,' and so he went outside and sat on the edge of the dark sparkling palace pool and stared up at the moon and thought of Kitty instead of actually swimming.

.

I'm thinking of you, too  
I'm thinking of you, too  
I'm thinking of you, too  
I'm thinking of you, too  
I'm thinking of you, too.


End file.
